“Odysseus obviously has been wearing clothing of our design while he’s been aboard the Queen Mab,” chirped Retrograde Sinopessen. “But the clothing he will wear during the rendezvous with the Voice’s orbital asteroid will have every sort of nano-sized recording and transmission device we could conceive of. We will all monitor his experience in real time.”

“Even those of us who are going down to Earth on the dropship?” asked Orphu.

There was an embarrassed silence. Moravecs were not given to frequent embarrassment, but they were capable of it.

“You were not chosen for the dropship crew,” Asteague/Che said at last in his clipped but not unpleasant tones.

“I know,” said Orphu, “but I think I can convince you that the drop-ship mission must be launched during the Mab’s aerobraking and that I have to be on board. The little corner of the hold on Mahnmut’s sub will serve me just fine as my passenger space. It has all the connections I need and I like the view.”

“The submersible bay has no view,” said Suma IV. “Except via video link, which might be interrupted if the dropship were to come under attack.”

“I was being ironic,” said Orphu.

“Also,” said Cho Li, making a noise like a small animal clearing its throat, “you are—technically, optically—blind.”

“Yes,” said Orphu, “I’ve noticed. But beyond proper affirmative-action hiring practices—never mind, it’s not worth the time to explain—I can give you three compelling reasons why I have to be included on the dropship mission to Earth.”

“We haven’t concluded that the mission itself should occur,” said Asteague/Che, “but please proceed with your reasons for being included. Then we Prime Integrators must make several decisions in the next fifteen minutes.”

“First of all, of course,” rumbled Orphu, “there’s the obvious fact that I will be a splendid ambassador to any and all sentient races we meet after landing on Earth.”

General Beh bin Adee made a rude sound. “Is that before or after you nuke them into radioactive pus?” he asked.

“Secondly, there is the less obvious but still salient fact that no moravec on this ship—perhaps no moravec in existence—knows more about the fiction of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and George Marie Wong—as well as the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman—than I do, therefore and ergo, no moravec knows more about human psychology than I do. Should we actually speak to an old-style human, my presence will be indispensable.”

I didn’t know you also studied Joyce, Faulkner, Wong, Dickinson, and Whitman, tightbeamed Mahnmut.

It never came up, answered Orphu. But I’ve had time to read out there in the hard vacuum and sulfur of the Io Torus over the last twelve hundred standard years of my existence.

Twelve hundred years! tightbeamed Mahnmut. Moravecs were designed for a long life span, but three standard centuries was generous for the average ‘vec’s existence. Mahnmut himself was less than one hundred fifty years old. You never told me you were that old!

It never came up, transmitted Orphu of Io.

“I did not quite follow all the logical connections there in the verbal part before you tightbeamed your friend,” said Asteague/Che, “but pray continue. I believe you said that you had three compelling reasons why you should be included.”

“The third reason I deserve a chair on the dropship,” said Orphu, “figuratively speaking, of course, is that I’ve figured it out.”

“Figured what out?” asked Suma IV. The dark buckycarbon Ganymedan wasn’t visibly checking his chronometer, but his voice was.

“Everything,” said Orphu of Io. “Why there are Greek gods on Mars. Why there’s a tunnel through space and time to another Earth where Homer’s Trojan War is still being fought. Where this impossibly terraformed Mars came from. What Prospero and Caliban, two characters from an ancient Shakespearean play, are doing waiting for us on this real Earth, and why the quantum basis for the entire solar system is being screwed up by these Brane Holes that keep popping up… everything.”

The woman who looked like a young Savi was indeed named Moira, although in the next hours Prospero sometimes called her Miranda and once he smilingly referred to her as Moneta, which added to Harman’s confusion. Harman’s embarrassment, on the other hand, was so great that nothing could add to it. For their first hour together, he could not look in Moira’s direction, much less look her in the eye. As Moira and he ate what amounted to breakfast as Prospero sat at the table, Harman finally managed to look in the woman’s direction but couldn’t raise his gaze to her eye level. Then he realized that this probably seemed as if he was staring at her chest, so he looked away again.

Moira seemed oblivious to his discomfort.

“Prospero,” she said, sipping orange juice brought to them by a floating servitor, “you foul old maggot. Was this key to my awakening your idea?”

“Of course not, Miranda, my dear.”

“Don’t call me Miranda or I’ll start calling you Mandrake. I am not now, nor was I ever, your daughter.”

“Of course you are and were my daughter, Miranda, my dear,” purred Prospero. “Is there a post-human alive whom I did not help become what they are? Were not my genetic sequencing labs your womb and your cradle? Am I therefore not thy father?”

“Is there another post-human alive today, Prospero?” asked the woman.

“Not to my knowledge, Miranda, dear.”

“Then fuck you.”

She turned to Harman, sipped coffee, sliced at an orange with a frighteningly sharp knife, and said, “My name is Moira.”

They were at a small table in a small room—a space more than a room—that Harman had not noticed before. It was an alcove set within the booklined wall halfway up the inside of the great inward-curving dome, at least three hundred feet above the marble-walled maze and floor. It was easy to understand why he hadn’t seen the space from below—the walls of this shallow alcove were also lined with books. There had been other alcoves along the way up, some holding tables like this one, others containing cushioned benches and cryptic instruments and screens. The iron stairways, it turned out, moved like escalators or it would have taken much longer for the three of them to climb this high. The exposure—there were no railings and the narrow marble walkways and the wrought-iron escalator steps were more air than iron—was horrifying. Harman hated to look down. He focused on the books instead and kept his shoulders against the shelves as he walked.

This woman was dressed much as Savi had been the first time he’d seen her—a blue tunic top made of cotton canvas, corded trousers, and high leather boots. She even wore a sort of short wool cape similar to the one he’d seen on Savi when they met, although this cape was a dark yellow rather than the deep red the older woman had worn. However, its complicated, many-folded cut seemed to be the same. The major difference between the two women—besides the vast difference in age—was that the older Savi had been carrying a pistol when they met, the first firearm Harman had ever seen. This version of Savi—Moira, Miranda, Moneta—he knew with absolute certainty, had not been armed when he first met her.

“What has happened since I first slept, Prospero?” asked Moira.

“You want a summary of fourteen centuries in as many sentences, my dear?”

“Yes. Please.” Moira separated the juicy orange into sections and handed a section to Harman, who ate it without tasting it.

“ ‘The woods decay,’ ” intoned the magus Prospero, “ ‘the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.’ ”